In a September 12, 2026, interview with the Qatar-backed outlet Middle East Eye, Eritrea’s Foreign Minister Osman Saleh warned about an emerging convergence among the United Arab Emirates, Israel, and Ethiopia in the Horn of Africa. The relationships of these states, however, are more differentiated than his formulation suggests, both in their origins and motivations.
Saleh’s formulation recalls an argument deployed during Eritrea’s struggle for secession three decades ago: that Ethiopia’s relationship with Israel was part of a wider Arab-Israeli contest over the Red Sea. Within that framework, Eritrean nationalists presented Eritrea to Arab governments not only as a secessionist struggle against Ethiopian rule, but also as a cause whose success could serve wider regional interests. The political logic was clear: Ethiopia is situated within a wider Israeli and Western strategic presence in the Red Sea, while Eritrean independence would be part of a regional struggle against that presence.
The connection between Ethiopia, Israel, and the wider Arab-Israeli conflict was already visible in contemporary assessments of the Eritrean insurgency.
That framing acquired considerable traction during the 1960s and 1970s. Israel maintained a security relationship with both the imperial and then, for a few years, the Marxist-Leninist military regime in Ethiopia, providing both military training and counterinsurgency assistance to help Ethiopia fight insurgencies in the Ogaden and Eritrea. Arab states and organizations, meanwhile, provided political, financial, and military support to Eritrean insurgents.
The connection between Ethiopia, Israel, and the wider Arab-Israeli conflict was already visible in contemporary assessments of the Eritrean insurgency. A May 1970 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate, The Situation in Eritrea, for example, reported that Eritrean Liberation Front broadcasts from Damascus increasingly portrayed the conflict through an explicitly anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist lens, linking the United States with “Zionist Israel and feudal Ethiopia.” The assessment further observed that Ethiopia’s deteriorating relations with the Muslim states of the region reflected the broader tensions generated by the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The significance of the document lies not only in its description of Eritrean Liberation Front/Eritrean People’s Liberation Front propaganda, but in its recognition that the Eritrean insurgency was being situated within a wider geopolitical contest encompassing Ethiopia, Israel, the Arab states, and the Red Sea. Saleh’s contemporary argument bears a resemblance to this earlier mode of internationalizing the Eritrean cause.
However, the contemporary Middle East is different from the one that the Eritrean regime cites. The United Arab Emirates, like many other Arab states, has diplomatic relations with Israel and has subsequently developed extensive bilateral cooperation with Israel.
Ethiopia, for its part, makes its own strategic calculations and has a much longer relationship with Israel. Indeed, Ethiopia’s relationship with Israel predates the contemporary regional order and has survived changes in Ethiopia’s political system and foreign-policy orientation. Historical continuity complicates any interpretation of current ties as evidence of a newly constituted Israeli-Ethiopian project directed against any state, be it in the Horn of Africa or the Middle East and North Africa.
Contemporary Ethiopia is a republic pursuing a more pragmatic, transactional and multi-vector foreign policy, in which relations with the Middle East and Gulf Arab states increasingly share overlapping interests.
Saleh’s framing sits uneasily with the transformation of Ethiopia itself. Ethiopia is no longer the Christian imperial monarchy that confronted Eritrean secessionism in the 1960s, nor the socialist Derg regime of the 1970s and 1980s, whose ideological orientation and shifting relationship with Israel followed the geopolitical rivalries of the Cold War and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Contemporary Ethiopia is a republic pursuing a more pragmatic, transactional and multi-vector foreign policy, in which relations with the Middle East and Gulf Arab states increasingly share overlapping interests in trade, investment, infrastructure, food security, and security. For the Gulf Arab states, Ethiopia is now more than a strategic position on the Red Sea’s western flank. Its large population and consumer market, agricultural potential, infrastructure needs, and growing economic significance make it a substantial partner in its own right.
This diversification has produced a regional order in which Gulf Arab states can maintain relations with Israel while simultaneously investing in Ethiopia, engaging Eritrea, cooperating with Egypt, and cultivating other Horn African relationships. Such diplomacy is better understood as multidirectional than as the reproduction of the relatively binary geopolitical structures of the Cold War. That is the central limitation of Saleh’s argument. He identifies a genuine network of relationships but interprets them through an outdated template. His historical analogy may have some relevance, but his blindness to decades of development that have occurred beyond Eritrea’s decades-long stagnation means his strategic conclusion is not.
